Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng for Personal Informatics

2026-02-28

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevailing focus of personal informatics systems on behavioral goal attainment, which often overlooks the role of cultural narratives in shaping everyday well-being. Through a 10-day contextual probe with 24 Korean young adults, combining micro-tasks and qualitative analysis, we investigate how participants navigate tensions—such as consistency versus flexibility and authenticity versus visibility—within the culturally situated practice of “God-Saeng” (self-care through disciplined self-management). Findings reveal that this practice not only fosters self-stability but may also exacerbate stress, highlighting how personal informatics can transcend mere tracking tools to support users in meaning-making and reflection within cultural and existential contexts. The work offers a novel pathway for designing personal informatics systems that are both culturally sensitive and reflective.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Applications of semantic technologies for improving search, browsing, recommendation, personalization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Personalized, context-aware and across-device search

Abstract

While Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng phenomenon, encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices, offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.

Problem

• Personal Informatics
• Everyday Well-Being
• God-Saeng
• Cultural Narratives
• Self-Tracking

Innovation

• Personal Informatics
• God-Saeng
• cultural narratives
• well-being
• reflexive design